A conversation about access and diversity

Academe asked three authorities to reflect on why diversity and access to higher education matter and how they can be protected if race-based affirmative action comes to an end.

Concerned that the current campaign against affirmative action may make it harder for students from traditionally underrepresented minority groups to go to college, Academe invited Thomas Mortenson, Deborah Carter, and Michael Olivas to reflect on the importance of ensuring the widest possible access to higher education. We asked them to suggest alternative ways to retain that access if race and ethnicity can no longer be factors in admissions, hiring, or financial aid. And we asked them to explore the notion of "merit" and whether it can be expanded beyond the traditional criteria of grades and test scores. Finally, we solicited their opinions about the educational value of diversity and the ways in which multiethnic and multiracial faculties and student bodies enhance the educational mission of the nation's colleges and universities. Their responses follow on pages 42-44.

THOMAS G. MORTENSON

Higher Education Policy Analyst, Postsecondary Education Opportunity and

Senior Scholar,

Center for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education

MY VIEWS ON AFFIRMATIVE act action, diversity, and access to higher education are influenced by my family's history in northern Europe and the United States, and by economic changes I see occurring in the labor force. Although they are personal, I believe these experiences are generally relevant.

My great-grandfather, Nels Martensson, left Sweden in 1880. He signed his name with an X. His parents were sharecroppers on the estate of a wealthy family that still owns several castles in southern Sweden. As the sixth of seven children, my great-grandfather had no prospects for a decent life if he remained in Sweden, so he left with his girlfriend for America, to join older siblings in Minnesota who had left Sweden a few years earlier. For Nels and his wife, life was a struggle. But their children prospered in Minnesota, and all received graduate-school educations. Surviving records attest to their pride in their literacy. In the next generation, my father's, all three boys graduated from the University of Minnesota. I modestly extended the educational accomplishments of my father, and my daughter, who loves learning and is far brighter than I am, may become the first in my family to earn a doctorate. I do not believe my family's story is in any way unique; it probably reflects the experiences of many, if not most, American families. Notably, it did not occur in Sweden, where it should have. It took the wrenching experience of leaving a homeland for the promise of America to get me to where I am today. That promise has become a reality for me and for many, many other Americans.

There is now a compelling need to move the pace of educational attainment forward faster than has occurred in the past. Since the early 1970s, income has been redistributed. The rich have gotten richer while the poor have become poorer, and, increasingly, what divides the two groups is educational attainment. The real incomes of families headed by persons with a high school education or less have declined sharply since 1973. The real incomes of those with bachelor's degrees have increased somewhat, but the incomes for families headed by persons with an education beyond the bachelor's degree have increased sharply.

If educational attainment is not greatly accelerated through outside intervention, the gap between the rich and the poor will widen even further and faster. In our brutal capitalistic economy, income (and the life choices and higher standards of living greater income allows) goes to those who earn it. And honesty and toil no longer suffice for earning income. Now one must add productivity, and productivity is increasingly determined by the education and training provided by postsecondary education.

Postsecondary educational opportunity is not a luxury, nor even a choice any longer: It has become, since 1973, an ever-more-pressing private and social imperative. The labor market is vastly oversupplied with unskilled and undereducated workers. That is why incomes for this group have gone down since 1973. At the highest levels of educational attainment, beyond the bachelor's degree, the labor market is undersupplied. That is why the real incomes of highly educated workers have increased much faster than inflation. The inadequacies of private, individual choices about postsecondary education and training have created this mismatch between demand and supply. Outside intervention, through targeted, crafted public policy is clearly and loudly called for.

The public policy approaches I favor are imbedded in Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965. They have been in place since the law's enactment. They focus on financial need and support services. Period. They make no mention of race, ethnicity, gender, state of residence, or left-handedness. They say that if you have financial need, there is an important public role in helping you finance your postsecondary education. They say that if you come from a family in which neither parent graduated from college, there is an important public role in helping you prepare for college and in counseling you while you are enrolled. Period. The genius of this approach is that it is focused on the most obvious, defensible, widely agreed upon sense of what defines disadvantage.

That certain racial or ethnic groups are more likely to demonstrate financial need, or to have parents who have not graduated from college, is obvious. But some racial minorities will come from the most advantaged of backgrounds and need no special financial counseling, and for this they deserve no special public policy intervention. On gender issues, we have moved from an era in which women were at a disadvantage in higher education to one in which men are now disadvantaged. No one deserves a break because of gender. But those who, regardless of gender or race, are financially needy or whose parents are unable to contribute to their college educations must receive outside help because their prospects are so bleak otherwise. And their accumulated bleak prospects bode ill for the rest of us who make it through the educational system.

My argument focuses on the financial and social capital needs of students who come from homes in which support is not present, or is at least scarce. Society has a clear and compelling interest in meeting these needs. But another public interest also needs to be addressed, and I will call it simply diversity. We are diverse in many ways, although most children grow up in enclaves that isolate them from this diversity. Few things are more characteristic of America than its diversity. On college campuses, where we want students to be challenged to grow and develop into functioning, contributing adults capable of critical thinking, students learn at least as much from other students as they do from teachers. Thus diversity creates a more challenging opportunity for growth than does homogeneity. And since the adult world into which students will eventually move, settle, and work will be diverse, a diverse college environment helps prepare them for that world.

I can see no reason at all for postsecondary educational opportunity to be curtailed, as it has been for the past two decades. I can see many solid reasons, however, for extending educational opportunity and making it nearly universal.

DEBORAH J. CARTER

Deputy Director, Office of Minorities in Higher Education, American Council on Education

HIGHER EDUCATION STILL needs race-based affirmative action. In the Bakke case, Justice Blackmun said that he suspected "that it would be impossible to arrange an affirmative action program in a racially neutral way and have it be successful. To ask that this be so is to demand the impossible. In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way." Many people, particularly whites, want to believe that we have accomplished what Justice Blackmun was talking about-that we have moved beyond racism in this country. We clearly have not. The perception that persons of color are as well off, or better off, than whites is far from the reality for most minorities. Nonetheless, because some minorities are enrolling in college in greater numbers, obtaining better jobs, and living fairly middle-class lifestyles, many whites believe that racial barriers and discrimination are relics of the past.

Unfortunately, we are not there yet. Racism is woven into the very fabric of our institutions and into our psyche as a nation. Most employment, income, housing, and education indicators show that persons of color, by and large, continue to experience unequal life opportunities compared to whites. For example, Asian American and Native American youths are nearly three times more likely than whites to have low incomes or be below the poverty line. The likelihood is even greater for Hispanic youths, who are six times more likely than young whites to be among the nation's poor. African American youths are twelve times more likely to be in that situation.

In education, the racism that plagues our nation is manifested in the inferior K-12 schools many children of color attend, as well as in our continued overreliance on measuring devices that do not adequately reflect minority students' potential. As several studies have already demonstrated, socioeconomic status is not a valid substitute for race. In fact, taking socioeconomic status into account would provide another benefit co whites, because there are nearly three times as many poor whites in the United States as there are poor blacks. Doing so would also promote a more economically diverse student population, but consideration of socioeconomic status cannot replace reliance on race. Both socioeconomic status and race or ethnicity should be used in admissions decisions. The bottom line is that if people experience inequities based on the color of their skin, as they do in this country, and if we are interested in diversifying our campuses because of the educational benefits that doing so achieves, race needs to be included as one factor among other admissions criteria.

Other nonacademic criteria, such as athletic ability, regional background, and relationships to alumni, have long been among the "plus factors" that admissions officers regularly take into account in order to create a diverse student body. Affirmative action asks merely that race be considered as one of those factors. Unfortunately, the only factor to generate a major public outcry has been race. Higher education has never been a true meritocracy, and the elimination of race as a plus factor will not make it one. It is unfortunate and offensive that the opponents of affirmative action are using the meritocracy argument to end the use of race as a factor in admissions decisions. They are using the cloak of merit to mount an attack that is fundamentally racist at its core.

Merit, many scholars agree, has been defined too narrowly in higher education. Even the College Board admits that test scores are limited in what they can predict about a student, and the board therefore encourages institutions to use a broad range of criteria in making admissions decisions. Using only test scores, the College Board explains, is not acceptable. A major stumbling block to changing this overreliance on quantitative measurements is that the academic community and the public use test scores and grade-point averages to assess institutions. Colleges and universities ought to consider the "whole" person. Simply relying on numerical values to assess "qualification" is an incomplete means of evaluating a student. The quantitative measurements that so reduce the educational opportunities of minority students reflect the environments from which they come. Though they attend schools that do not prepare them well for college, they should not be penalized for those circumstances. Higher education should not be a vehicle to perpetuate the educational inequities of our society. The present system, by continuing to focus the greatest resources on students who have had the benefits of a good education, simply maintains the imbalance between the haves and have-nots. The goal of higher education is to provide students with what they do not have. Instead, we have fallen into a pattern of providing more to those who already have while providing little to those who need the most.

All students, not just minority ones, gain from affirmative action. Diversity is critical to higher education. The learning that can occur in multiracial and multiethnic classes cannot be replicated in any other way. Students must learn from others who are different from them, and they must be able to work across those differences. In the end, increased access that leads to increased campus and classroom diversity will allow higher education to fulfill its mission of preparing students for active civic engagement and participation in a diverse workforce.

MICHAEL A. OLIVAS

William B. Bates Professor of Law and Director, Institute for Higher Education Law and Governance, University of Houston

NOTHING RACES LIKE RACE. Neither economic nor other substitute measures can capture the unique characteristics of racial criteria in the United States. While race as a criterion is an imperfect measure, one that can overstate disadvantage, it is sui generis, one of a kind. Being a person of color is almost always the most salient feature of a minority person. Anglos are so comfortable with their dominance that they understand disadvantage only when they are in a reverse situationwhen they visit a tribal college or a black institution, or when they become convinced that they were denied a privilege that went instead to a minority. No one is as certain of racial mischief as an aggrieved Anglo.

Studies have shown how problematic substitute measures are. Since Hopwood v. Texas and the passage of Proposition 209 in California, public colleges in the Fifth Circuit and the state of California have been unable to consider race in student admissions. As a result, minority admissions and enrollments in public institutions in the Fifth Circuit and the University of California system have plummeted-even though substitute measures have been used. In Texas, administrations of some private colleges bailed out of affirmative action efforts even though they were not required by law to do so. Such support as was evident for affirmative action turned out to be a mile wide but an inch deep.

Many whites are convinced that they earned their achievements through merit, because of their hard work and diligence. Some believe that any achievement by a person of color must have been won by compromising standards or by liberal political means. These beliefs persist despite the sheer numbers of whites who gained their positions by luck, timing, or the sponsorship of others-and despite the clear merits presented by most successful people of color. Academe is more like coaching in the National Football League-where family ties, comfort levels, and connections prevail-than most observers will concede. The sons of white coaches Don Shula and Bum Phillips are more likely to be hired (and recycled to be hired again) than is the superbly qualified black assistant coach Sherman Lewis, destined to be an assistant coach for life.

The answer to recruiting or hiring is to look more widely. Faculties or admissions people often take administrative shortcuts, relying too heavily on flawed measures such as test scores. At the University of Houston Law Center, even after Hopwood we were able to maintain a diverse student body by reading thousands of applicant files and by increasing the number of discretionary admissions-without racial references. Of course, many Anglo applicants identified disadvantage or wrote about why they would make good lawyers, and it took many faculty hours to slog through the large number of files. Many schools are just not willing to undertake the extra work. We also admitted that, beyond a certain point, virtually all the students could likely do the work. Because of the cost of applying to a school and all the information available to applicants today, self-selection is common. Of course, Georgetown still gets ten thousand applications for seven hundred places. At such schools, numbers take on great significance. The trick is not to let numbers drive the entire enterprise, We have U.S. News & World Report to thank for some of the reliance on test scores, but not all the blame can be laid at the magazine's feet.

Affirmative action is truly determinative only at highly selective schools or in selective programs at moderately elite institutions. At the time of the Hopwood case, the University of Texas's doctoral program in educational psychology was busy selecting 15 to 18 students from 223 applicants. Candidates were narrowed to forty "finalists," with race as one of several criteria. Yet, the program withstood a legal challenge from a disgruntled, unsuccessful white applicant, because the faculty used a wide-ranging series of markers and took the time to read the files.

Many programs can, and must, rely on race as envisioned by Justice Powell in Bakke-in a modest, supplemental fashion. Such reliance is still the law of the land, University of California regent Ward Connerly notwithstanding.

Copyright American Association of University Professors Jul/Aug 1998
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